t
was the curious nature of the place – a roundabout
with seven streets radiating out like spokes of a wheel. And
then there was that wonderful pillar, like an ancient artifact – an
obelisk or totem or the like – and just below its pointy
top, six faces, six clocks (sundials, actually). There should
have been seven – for Seven Dials – but the number
of radiant streets was originally six, the seventh came later.
Each street had the face of a sundial at its terminus – six
streets, six dials. Then came the seventh. A street without
a dial.

He recalled showing this curious monument to Daisy and then
launching off into an exceptionally convoluted and tangential
lecture about some obtuse etymology that had a peculiar meaning
to him and, because Daisy actually loved him (sort of), also
became of interest to her (at least, that’s what he allowed
himself to believe). For historical interest (simply that – nothing
more intended), this is what he told her:

‘"Dial” is one of those marvellous words that evolved,
through many twists and turns, from the Latin, originally coming
from “dies” which, itself, meant “day”.
Our use of the term most likely originated from the Middle
English “rota dialis” or “daily wheel” which
gave us a whole slew of words, including “sundial”,
rather cleverly combining the concept of circular motion with
the idea of passage of time. Over its long and dusty journey, “dial” -
a pleasant little word, don’t you think? - came to mean “something
round” (like a clock face), with a sense of rotation
as well, so that when the telephone was eventually discovered
(a term I prefer to ‘invented’ as it has more of
the actual gestalt – implying that “telephone” was
always there just waiting to be found – you see what
I mean? No? Anyway…) the rotary wheel that came with
the phone’s early evolution, was itself called a “dial” followed
by the verb, ‘to dial’, which meant “to turn
the circular mechanical bit with one’s finger in order
to process a call”. And then, when the circular bit morphed
into push buttons, the language came with it, like a little
obedient dog, so “to dial a number” continued meaning “to
make a phone call” even though the sense of the rotating
wheel had been lost in the flurry of terrible techno-babble.
Are you following me?’

“I’m following you but what’s the point?” she
said.

“Does everything have to have a point?” he asked, a bit
disgruntled.

“Most things do, yes…”

Maybe that was the difference between her and him (or him and
her). He didn’t believe that things had to have a point
at all.

‘I wanted to give you some idea of why it’s called Seven
Dials,’ he said, gesturing toward the monument. ‘Most
people don’t know what a “dial” is anymore…’

‘But there are only six,’ she reminded him.

‘What?’

‘Dials. There are only six dials. See? One, two, three, four,
five, six…’ She counted them off on her fingertips. ‘So
why isn’t it called “Six Dials”?’

He scratched his head. “Six Dials doesn’t sound
as good, does it?”

Then he launched off on another explanation: ‘In
the early part of the 17th century, the area now known as Seven
Dials was marshy fields. But as London was growing by
leaps and bounds, it was prime land for developers. And there
was this guy named Neale…’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I know. Neale’s Yard. Great
place for face creams and shampoo that doesn’t rust your
scalp…’

‘Well… history has a strange way of transforming
names of people and things into something very far removed
from what they were or what they ever hoped to be. That Mr.
Neale is known for hair tonic rather than cleaning up a putrid
swamp, is more than ironic…’

‘Why ironic?’

‘Because if he were like most 17th century gentlemen adventurers,
he probably washed his hair six times in his life. Don’t
you find it ironic that nowadays we’d rather build mental
statues to people we connect with herbal infusions and body
lotions rather than with urban design?’

She shrugged. ‘Herbal infusions and body lotions are
important too…’

He felt she was probably having him on, but he knew that partly
it was just their curious dialectical banter. On the other
hand, who in the world would have a conversation like this,
at midday, in the middle of the street – madmen aside?

‘Look,’ he said, ‘Seven Dials is a metaphor. Standing
here we’re only what? A ten minute walk from Leicester
Square? But back then it was a smelly swamp at the city’s
fringe. So what happened? And why? Neale was a visionary but
he was also a man of his time. A decade before, Neale probably
would have been selling shares in tulips…’

‘Tulips?’ She looked at him questioningly. ‘Tulipmania
was in 1634. That was a few years before Neale’s time.’

‘…
or something. Anyway, the Dutch are involved up to their necks.
Think about it, here we are in the late 1600s. London is on
the move. No longer a sleepy backwater, she’s starting
her long and determined march into destiny. And it’s
all because of the Dutch…'

‘Wait a second. How did the Dutch get into this soliloquy of
yours? I thought we were talking about Neale and Seven Dials
which was actually Six?’

’The Dutch were involved in everything – you must have
figured that out by now. At least they were by the late 1600s.
Most people don’t know because they were very quiet about
it. Not the in-your-face stuff of the French and the Germans.
They just went about their business. How many people really
know about the Glorious Revolution?’

‘It was only “glorious” if you were Protestant,’ she
reminded him.

‘It wasn’t about religion. That was just a convenient
excuse. Godly loyalties changed depending on the prevailing
wind. What’s important is that in 1687, England became
a centre for international finance - after the Dutch marched
in…’

‘At the invitation of the Anglican church,’ she reminded
him. ‘Anyway they weren’t Dutch…’

‘Who?’

‘The invading troops. They were mercenaries. Half of them were
Swedes and Scots..’

‘Yeah. There were even a few hundred blacks brought over to
fight from the Americas. But don’t forget, a good number
of those mercenaries were Catholic. Did you know there were
even suggestions a lump of money that went to finance this
so-called Protestant invasion came directly from the Pope because
he hated Louis of France more than William of Orange?’

‘That’s just my point. They weren’t Dutch.’

‘So who were the Dutch? The Portuguese Jews? The refugees from
the Spanish Netherlands? The Swedes, the Swiss, the Poles,
the Scots who manned their army and crewed their ships? Holland
in 1680 was a hodgepodge. Being Dutch wasn’t a thing,
it was an idea…’

Her eyes were starting to glaze over. ‘I know you don’t
believe in points, but does this have anything to do with Seven
Dials or Six Dials or anything else I might have missed?’

‘Like I said, it’s the Dutch connection. In 1690 William
of Orange granted Thomas Neale, a land developer, some marshland
known as ‘Cock and Pye Fields’. Ordinarily there
would have been a street or two and several rows of houses
constructed. But Neale, rather ingeniously (and as a way of
maximizing his profit), devised a plan whereby six streets –a
seventh came later – would branch out from a central
hub on which was built a magnificent pillar – a sundial
with six faces, so that each of the radiating streets would
be overseen by its own timekeeping apparatus. But that kind
of imaginative urban expansion took finance. And William of
Orange brought with him capital, fiscal expertise and new methods
of servicing debt. What could be more Dutch than that?’

‘Is that it?’ she asked, rather hopefully.

‘There’s a coffee connection, you know.’

Her eyes lit up. ‘There is? What is it?’

Now that he had her attention, he thought he’d let her
dangle.

‘You know that engraving I have on my wall?’

‘The Hogarth in your kitchen?’

It was Gin Lane, William Hogarth’s iconic engraving of
London low life in a drunken bacchanal. Central to the eye,
in the foreground, a woman sits at the top of a steep flight
of stairs. She’s dressed in rags, her blouse torn open
exposing her saggy nursemaid’s bosom. Her body slumps
like a beat-up Raggedy Anne. Her face wears a silly dissipated
grin. The poor woman is so far gone that she’s blissfully
unaware her baby has fallen from her arms over the side of
the railing and is plunging to its almost certain death. Except
it isn’t. Instead it’s trapped forever in the aspic
of the artist’s pen, a look of surprised terror embossed
on its angelic countenance. The falling baby is frozen in time.
As is its drunken mother. As is the grotesquely distorted man
behind her gnawing on a monstrous bone while a mangy dog chews
at the other end. And to the side another mother is eternally
fixed in the act of feeding her child a glass of demon gin.

‘How can you have that horrible scene hanging in your kitchen?’ she
asked him.

‘If it was anyone else, it would be horrible and I certainly
wouldn’t have it in my rooms. But it’s Hogarth.
And because it’s Hogarth, it’s not horrible at
all. In fact, it’s almost charming.’

‘Charming?’ Hey, maybe there’s something about this
guy I don’t know, she thought.

‘Like Bruegel.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard “Bruegel” and “charming” used
in the same sentence, either,’ she said.

‘So you heard it from me first…’

‘As with many things,’ she admitted.

‘Charming’, of course, wasn’t the word for Hogarth’s
Gin Lane. And both he and she knew that the term was bandied
more for its value to shock (if not shock then certainly to
astonish) because of its supposedly inappropriate nature. Still
there was an aspect of truth to what he uttered (a small, tiny
aspect to be sure – but an aspect none-the-less).

‘There’s grotesqueness to an R. Crumb cartoon, as well,’ he
said. ‘But there’s also a wittiness and humour
that one could call “charm”.’

‘If one wanted to misuse the word. You’re the linguist…’

‘Well, there’s a sense of the word that means “to
give delight” or “to arouse admiration”…’

‘Aren’t you the same person who argues that language needs
to be understood in the context of the situation? Or have I
miss-quoted you?’

‘One also has the right to have one’s own vocabulary…’

‘Not if one wishes to be understood by others…’

‘If you simply view Hogarth as grotesque you’re missing
the point…’

‘You don’t call babies being abused grotesque then?’

‘Sure, when you analyse what you see, you might call it grotesque,
but when you look at the whole picture what stands out is the
wittiness. You might call a Tom and Jerry cartoon grotesque
when the mouse hits the cat over the head with a giant sledgehammer
but the idea is so absurd that you forget the violence and
focus instead on the humour. Hogarth is like that…’

‘Except Hogarth did his drawings to push a political point.
People were killing themselves and abusing their children because
of Demon Gin. Tom and Jerry were designed to make children
laugh - though, personally, I don’t see anything funny
about animal violence ….(this last bit was said as more
of a mutter since she really didn’t want to get onto
the subject of cartoon cruelty with him just now as it would
take up the rest of the day debating issues that they had been
round and round and round before ad nauseum).

‘Hogarth was first and foremost a satirist – similar to
Jonathan Swift. You can call Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels grotesque too if you want…’

‘You’re right, I wouldn’t hang his book in my kitchen…’
He could tell from her face, from the wrinkling of her brow,
the drawing of her lips in a serpentine motion, the narrowing
of her eyes into slits that appeared to him like armour worn
by errant knights getting ready to launch themselves, however
unwillingly, into deep and deadly battle, that, perhaps he
should ease up on her a bit.

‘I promised you a coffee connection, didn’t I?’

‘That you did.’

‘Coffee and gin. They both had a strong connection with Holland.
One directly, the other indirectly. But both those commodities
came to represent the duality of the new economic order – coffee
was the stuff that would lubricate the wheels of commerce;
gin was the stuff that would mask the pain and suffering the
new economic order revealed. Think about it. A generation before,
nobody had heard of gin and few people in England had ever
tasted coffee. Within a few decades of the Dutch invasion,
coffee houses were everyplace and gin dens had become so ubiquitous
that Hogarth was driven to use them as his metaphor of consummate
evil…’

‘And you’re blaming all this on William of Orange, are
you?’

‘In a manner of speaking. But I wouldn’t say “blame” was
the operative word here. What do you know about gin, by the
way?’

‘I know I don’t like it. I do know it came from Holland,
originally…’

‘Like a lot of things we now think are bad for us, gin was invented
by a doctor as a tonic for treating kidney disease and gout…’

‘I thought alcohol was bad for the kidneys,’ she said.

‘It wasn’t alcohol that was seen as the therapeutic agent;
it was the juniper berry that was brewed into the drink.
Dutch gin, known as jenever, became exceedingly popular almost overnight.
It was easy to distil and cheap to make. And when William
of Orange came to the British throne, barrels of the stuff came
with him. Gin became popular in England after the government
allowed unlicensed gin production and at the same time imposed
a prohibitive duty on all imported spirits…’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What possibly
could have been the incentive for unleashing that terrible
plague? You know what gin was called back then? “Mother’s
Ruin!” And that’s exactly what it was!’

He arched his eyebrow – the left one, not the right.
The left one was reserved for when he questioned her judgment.
The right one was arched when he questioned his own.

‘”Mother’s Ruin” was poverty,’ he said. ‘Nobody
spoke of “Mother’s Ruin” when gin became
popular amongst the middle classes.’ And without waiting
for her to respond, he continued, ‘But as to why the
government unleashed this plague, they did it for the same
reason that any government unleashes plagues – it made
for good business. Gin could be distilled from poor-quality
grain that was unfit for brewing beer. So the government
encouraged the gin trade to help prop up grain prices, which,
at the time,
were very low indeed. So low, in fact, that it was causing
a depression in the farming industry.’

‘But there was another reason…’ she said. ‘Pacification
of the lumpen mobs…’

‘That was one side of the equation. But on the other side was
the wheels of commerce – and you don’t keep them
turning with a sozzled workforce.’

‘So that’s where coffee comes in, does it? But how were
the Dutch involved? Coffee was already in England by then…’

‘It might have been here but it was hardly known. Coffee was
popularised through the network of cafes and coffeehouses
relating back to the development of the financial markets that were
being perfected by the Dutch…’

She looked slightly disappointed. ‘That’s pretty
vague stuff,’ she said. ‘I thought you promised
me a coffee connection with Seven Dials. You’ve gone
an awful long way just to leave me with a vague supposition….’

‘Who said I was finished?’ he told her brightly.

‘Oh, God!’ she muttered aloud and closed her pretty eyes.

‘Hogarth, St. Giles …’ He waved his hand in the
direction of Bloomsbury and the steeple of St George. ‘We’re
in the heart of Gin Lane right here, right now. Just a few
decades after Neale’s great urban development, the
area quickly went down hill and soon became one of the worst
slums
in Europe. Here where we’re standing was one pole in
the continuum from drunkenness and despair to vigor and hopefulness.
And Hogarth had a foot in both camps…’

‘How so?’

‘Through his father – a failed academic writer who ended
up in debtor’s prison and whose dream was to start…’ His
voice faded out as he tried to gaze into the distance through
the London slime.